Well, first off, we gave away all of our Alaska cruising guides. Here’s one of the many things wrong with over 60, we have no idea to whom, or when, or even how. Not that we would ask for them back. But we had them on our boat when we sailed south to San Francisco. And they are not with us anywhere.
So I looked at the choices for cruising guides and could not find anything better than what we had already bought once. I asked the advice of our good friend Elsie Hulsizer, who has written about Alaska after cruising extensively up there, and she agreed with my choice.
We’ll take the recent edition of the Douglass guide, the new Waggoner’s Guide (with a lot of new info about Alaska), and of course Elsie’s book Glaciers, Bears and Totems.
Then we start looking at the Route Planning Map (which for some reason I did not give away). Last night I picked 24 places we want to stop. 24 is a lot of places. We have 12 weeks up there – 10 days up, 10 days back, then another 3 months to explore. 24 stops across a geographical area 3,000+ sq miles, traveling at 5 mph. Plus I need to work, and now I need to plan when and where and tell my boss.
So we went through our list, put them in order, scratched some off, put some in questionable state, and came up with a more reasonable list. We’ll ask Elsie and Steve about the questionable ones (where do we anchor overnight when we go to Anan Bear Reserve, and is Ford’s Terror even do-able without being terrifying?). And we came up with some alternative ideas – I really would love to ride the train from Skagway over Chilkoot pass (although also likely terrifying), but don’t want to bash up Lynn Canal to get there, so we can fly up from Juneau.
Besides working some, we also have friends flying up, so this will help them start making their plans. This is such a case of So Much To See, So Little Time. But we have to remember, Yohelah will be back in the Salish Sea again and this won’t be her last trip to SE. But it’s gonna be a fun one!
